“You’re right.” Kevin nodded. “It’s a good idea, really. It’s just that he’s a sort of hermit, now. I haven’t seen him myself in a long time.”
Nadezhda shrugged. “We all get strange. I would like to see him anyway.”
“You know him?”
“We met once, long ago.”
So Kevin agreed, a bit apprehensively, to take her up to see him.
Before they left Oscar showed them his library, contained in scores of cardboard boxes; one whole room was full of them. Kevin glanced in a box and saw a biography of Lou Gehrig. “Hey Oscar, you ought to join our softball team!”
“No thank you. I detest softball.”
Doris snorted. “What?” Kevin said. “But why?”
Oscar shifted into a martial arts stance. Low growclass="underline" “The world plays hardball, Claiborne.”
The world plays hardball. Sure, and he could handle it. But not his hill, not Rattlesnake Hill!
It was not just that it stood behind his house, which was true, and important; but that it was his place. It was an insignificant little round top at the end of the El Modena hills, broken dirty sandstone covered with scrub, and a small grove of trees which had been planted by his grandfather’s grade school class, many years before. It stood there, the only empty hilltop in the area, because it had been owned for decades by the Orange County Water District, who left it alone.
And no one seemed to go up there but him. Oh, occasionally he’d find an empty beer dumpie or the like, thrown away on the summit. But the hill was always empty when he was there—quiet except for insect creaks, hot, dusty, and somehow filled with a sunny, calm presence, as if inhabited by an old Indian hill spirit, small but powerful.
He went up there when he wanted to work outdoors. He took his sketchpad, up to his favorite spot on the western edge of the copse of trees, and he’d sit and look out over the plain and sketch rooms, plans, interiors, exteriors. He’d done that for most of his life, had done a fair amount of homework there in his schooldays. He had scrambled up the dry ravines on the western side, he had thrown rocks off the top, he had followed the track of an old dirt road that had once spiraled up it. He went there when he was feeling lazy, when he only wanted to sit in the sun and feel the earth turning under him. He went there with women friends, at night, when he was feeling romantic.
Now he went up there and sat in the dirt, in his spot. Midday, the air hot, filled with dust and sage oils. He brushed his hands over the soil, over the sharp-edged nondescript sandstone pebbles. Picked them up, rubbed them together in his hands. He couldn’t seem to achieve his usual feeling of peace, however, his feeling of connection with the ground beneath him; and the ballooning sense of lightness, the kind of epiphany he had felt while bicycling home the other night, eluded him completely. He was too worried. He could only sit and touch the earth, and worry.
At work he thought about it, worried about it. He and Hank and Gabriela were busy finishing up two jobs, one down in Costa Mesa, and he worked on the trim and clean-up in a state of distraction. Could they really want to develop Rattlesnake Hill? “It’s that view they’re after.” If they were going to build, they would need more water. If they were going to have a view, in El Modena… there really wasn’t any other choice! Rattlesnake Hill. A place where—he realized this one morning, scraping caulking off of tile—where when you were there, you felt quite certain it would never change. And that was part of its appeal.
Usually when Kevin was working he was happy. He enjoyed most of the labor involved in construction, especially the carpentry. All of it, really. The direct continual results of his efforts, popping into existence before his eyes: framing, wiring, stucco, painting, tilework, trim, they all had their pleasures for him. And as he did the designs for their little team’s work, he also had the architect’s pleasure of seeing his ideas realized. With this Costa Mesa condo rehab, for instance, a lot of things had been uncertain: would you really be able to see the entire length of the structure, rooms opening on rooms? Would the atrium give enough light to that west wing? No way to be sure until it was done; and so the pleasure of work, bringing the vision into material being, finding out whether the calculations had been correct. Solving the mystery. Not much delayed gratification in construction. Immediate gratification, little problem after little problem, faced and solved, until the big problem was solved as well. And all through the process, the childlike joys of hammering, cutting, measuring. Bang bang bang, out in the sun and the wind, with clouds as his constant companions.
Usually. But this week he was too worried about the hill. Touch-up work, usually one of his favorite parts, seemed pale diversion, finicky and boring. He hardly even noticed it. And his town work was positively irritating. They would be digging out that street forever at their pace!
He had to get some answers. He had to go up and confront Alfredo, like he had said he would that morning at Oscar’s. No way around it.
So one afternoon after town work he pedaled up into the hills, to the house on Redhill where a big group of Heartech people lived. Alfredo’s new home.
The house was set on a terrace, cut high on the side of the hill above Tustin and Foothill. It was a huge white lump of Mission Revival, a style Kevin detested. To him the California Indians were noble savages, devastated by Junípero Serra’s mission system. Thus Mission Revival, which every thirty years or so swept through southern California architecture in a great nostalgic wave, seemed to Kevin no more than a kind of homage to genocide. Any time he got the chance to renovate an example of the style he loved to obliterate it.
One small advantage to Mission Revival was it was always easy to find the front door—in this case a huge pair of oak monsters, standing in the center of a massive wall of whitewashed adobe, under a tile-roofed portico. Kevin stalked up the gravel drive and yanked on a thick rope bellpull.
Alfredo himself answered, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. “Kevin, what a surprise. Come on in, man.”
“I’d rather talk out here, if you don’t mind. Do you have time?”
“Sure, sure.” Alfredo stepped out, leaving the door open. “What is it?”
No really indirect approach to the issue had suggested itself to Kevin, and so he said, “Is it true that you and Ed and John are planning to build an industrial park on Rattlesnake Hill?”
Alfredo raised his eyebrows. Kevin had expected him to flinch, or in some other way look obviously guilty. The fact that he didn’t made Kevin uneasy, nervous—a little bit guilty himself. Perhaps Oscar had misoverheard.
“Who told you that?”
“Never mind who—I just heard it. Is it true?”
Alfredo paused, shrugged. “There’re always plans being talked around—”
Ah ha!
“—but I don’t know of anything in particular. You would know if there was something up, being on the council.”
Anger fired through Kevin, quick and hot. “So that’s why you tried to slip that water stuff past us!”
Alfredo looked puzzled. “I didn’t try to slip anything past anyone. Some business was taken care of—or we tried—in front of the whole council, in the ordinary course of a meeting. Right?”
“Well, yeah, that’s right. But it was late, everyone was tired, I was new. No one was watching anymore. It was as close to slipping the thing under the door as you could get.”
“A council meeting is a council meeting, Kevin. Things go on right till the last moment. You’re going to have to get used to that.” Alfredo looked amused at Kevin’s naïveté. “If someone wanted to slip something by, it could have been shoved in among a bunch of other changes, it could have been done in the town planner’s office and presented as boilerplate—”